A Journey (23 page)

The second remarkable thing was the performance of the Lib Dem speaker, Robert Maclennan, who was then their law and order spokesman. This story reveals the problem with them. Now the Lib Dems’ official position was as weak-kneed and liberal, with the smallest of ‘l’s, as you can imagine. They basically took civil liberties to the point where the worst punishment was a jolly good talking-to and the most important thing was to crack down hard on police brutality, all of which was a million miles from the heart and mind of your average British bobby.

I got up and spoke. Truth to tell I was a bit shamefaced, since I thought some of the reforms seemed entirely sensible, but I made a reasonable fist of sounding angry at the injustice of it all and was duly applauded.

Then it was Robert’s turn. Now just a word about him. John Smith used to call his speeches in the Commons the work of a one-man crowd-dispersal unit. To describe Bob as a dull speaker was to fail completely to convey the full nature of the experience. If you had to follow him in the House as the next speaker and so had to listen to him, you could miss your opening just because he had reduced you to a catatonic state. By the way, he was also intelligent and decent and obviously so, and that didn’t endear him much either.

So it was with the anticipation of considerable amusement that I saw Bob rise to address 10,000 coppers who I guessed would not appreciate being bored near to death by a Liberal. I can only describe his speech as one of the most electrifying I’ve ever heard. He knew what they wanted to hear. He had read their handouts describing the unparalleled iniquity of the proposed reforms. He gazed on their 10,000 expectant, upturned faces as he laid into the government not just with abandon, but with what appeared to be genuine, sustained and unstoppable outrage. By the time he had finished painting a picture of a country whose poor police were shackled and downtrodden while laughing criminals ransacked the nation, and all as part of a deliberate and heinous Home Office plot, the Fed committee, the 10,000 coppers, even the sound and lighting people were on their feet, stomping, roaring, baying for more from Bob the policeman’s best friend.

However, it did all illustrate the problems with the Lib Dems. When it came right down to it, they were happier as critics than as actors. As time went on and I became more convinced we needed radical solutions to welfare and public services, not to say law and order issues, they gravitated naturally and contentedly towards an opposing position. The dream of getting them to reunite social democracy faded. Paddy was a leader really committed to the idea of uniting the progressive forces. Charles Kennedy was a very decent guy, but not of the same commitment. Iraq was such a massive point of disagreement, and became such a huge recruiting and campaigning bonus to the Lib Dems, that after it our relations soured completely. It was a pity, but probably inevitable. To begin with, I thought that the sheer force of a reasonable position, reasonably argued, would win the day. Over time you learn that this is not so; change brings opposition, and opposition is much easier to advocate than change.

Another early reminder of this came with the changes to housing benefit we introduced in the summer of 1997. They were entirely justified in order to stop abuse of the system, but suddenly and for the first time we knocked up against the need for a difficult decision as a government. The backbench revolt was immediate and large (with Lib Dems joining in). The size of the majority could take care of it, but there were ugly moments. When we then proposed further radical cuts to the welfare bill through reforming incapacity benefit, similar scenes were played out. We wanted to cut the welfare bill radically as the costs had risen sharply and now ran into billions. We were still handling the fallout from the recession of the early 1990s in terms of public finances. We had given a commitment – a very tough one, which Gordon stuck to, tenaciously and rightly – to keep to the previous government’s spending totals for our first two years, but nonetheless wanted to get more money into health and education, and so were looking for every way we could to trim the welfare costs. In any event, it was clearly unhealthy for people to be subsidised on a life of benefit; and when they could work, then in their own interests, they should.

As with housing benefit, incapacity benefit had also become open to systematic abuse. In the 1980s, as long-term unemployment rose it suited the government quietly to allow large numbers of people, particularly in the old mining industries, to be transferred on to the incapacity register. They would thus count as sick, not unemployed, and the unemployment figures were reduced. All of us knew people in our constituencies who had spent years on benefit when their incapacity seemed, let us say, more than a trifle exaggerated.

The proposed changes had people chaining themselves to the railings of Downing Street in protest. They were usually chosen as protesters by virtue of being in wheelchairs, as if everyone on incapacity benefit was confined to a wheelchair, or all those in wheelchairs were unable to work – both of which positions I thought highly dubious. But that wasn’t the point. Naturally, they elicited much sympathy.

Then at the end of July, as the summer recess approached, David Blunkett announced the introduction of means-tested tuition fees, and so began the long and often slow march towards university reform. Again cries of outrage and betrayal ensued.

It was all manageable, of course, but it was a portent.

We were a popular government, I still retained high approval ratings, but even back then, the signs were clear of storms and troubles to come.

I was learning, on the job, the trade of prime minister, the trade of decision-maker and responsibility-taker and, as I occasionally stepped back and surveyed it all, I could see where it was going. I could see the end even as I lived the beginning. I could see the rhythm of it all. The difference between beginning and end is not – major crises like wars excepted – simply in the nature of the events themselves. In other words, an event – let’s say a scandal – can occur at the start, and because everyone is still in the throes of excitement at the new government it can be overcome reasonably easily. If it occurs later, it can be terminal. It depends less on the nature of the events than on their place in the cycle. The adversity, the intensity of the criticism, the fullness of the attack grow not in proportion to the decisions of leadership, but rather to the chipping away over time of its freshness, its appeal, its novelty and thus its persuasive power.

At first, in those early months and perhaps in much of that initial term of office, I had political capital that I tended to hoard. I was risking it but within strict limits and looking to recoup it as swiftly as possible. Over Kosovo, the first real life-and-death decision, I spent freely. But in domestic terms, I tried to reform with the grain of opinion, not against it.

If things went calm for a time, I wasn’t in any great mood to disturb them. We were making changes. Devolution was one and that was historic. But much of the fruit was low-hanging. Some of it was even popular, like the minimum wage.

In public services, we had all the right language and all the right intentions, but the method tended to be one of driving change from the centre. The origins of later, far more radical change were discernible in those starting months, yet the policy prescriptions were too tame; the belief in the power of government itself to make the change on the ground was too trusting; and perhaps also we had an analysis that underestimated the gravity of the problems and therefore the requirement for reform of a nature that was fundamental and structural.

The instincts were by and large spot on. The knowledge, the experience, the in-depth understanding that grappling over time induces – these qualities were missing. There was a political confidence, even swagger about us; but it was born of our popularity with the country, not our fitness to change it as it needed.

That rhythm, too, was intruding and I was aware of it, for the first time. Of course I knew from the moment I became leader of the Labour Party that you never end as you begin. I understood completely that the business of politics was rough, the public could be fickle, the cracks and crevasses would appear soon enough, even in a carefully constructed edifice of political advancement; and our edifice had been constructed with immense care. But to contemplate it is one thing; to experience it is another. And feeling it first-hand both disconcerted me and sobered me.

No one ever believes a politician when he or she says this, but I was never desperate to be prime minister or to stay as prime minister. That’s the honest truth. I don’t mean I lacked ambition – I had plenty of that – but I did lack courage. I knew it would be brutal and ugly, and could end in tears.

In my moments of reflection on holiday in 1997, down in the south of France in the lovely old twelfth-century house we used to stay at in the Ariège – a beautiful and understated part of the country – I would think of the future. I would think of being released, of escaping with reputation and soul intact having served two terms, handing over to Gordon – let him have the damn thing – and being free again, free of all the anxiety, the responsibility, the living on a perpetual knife-edge where any slip could cut you to pieces. I thought of how good it would be to go, still young, just past fifty, still popular, still a friendly face in a friendly country. I would lead, of course, to the best of my ability. I wouldn’t shirk the tough decisions. But I prayed they would not be those that could lose it all, could end in failure and humiliation. Get out before they stop listening, stop liking, and start loathing. That was my hope.

Yet I could sense the rhythm, feel its relentless and ever so slightly louder drumbeat, sense its effect on the country around me.

We were already starting to take the decisions that chip away at the stock of goodwill. It was amazing how even the most anodyne or seemingly consensual changes could result in a fierceness of response out of all proportion to the measure. Even David Blunkett’s introduction of the literacy and numeracy tests – necessary to raise the low levels of eleven-year-old attainment from the roughly 50 per cent pass rate we inherited – caused shrieks of protest. I wasn’t startled by it. But there was a slightly dangerous mood among the back benches that indicated they were profoundly unprepared for the travails of government. Having enjoyed the serenity of Opposition life, where everyone could imbibe some of the Lib Dem liqueur and just nod along, they were now having to grow accustomed to returning to their constituencies and getting an earful; not a really painful one, but nonetheless the change was a shock. At one of my regular PLP briefings, when the whole of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be invited to the Large Committee Room of the House of Commons to hear the leader’s words of wisdom, I joked that when we were in Opposition, life was easy: MPs just went back home and blamed it all on the government; the trouble is, some of them still do. It’s extraordinary how anyone who opposes the government is principled while anyone who is loyal is just a sycophant, when the support is usually far harder than the opposition, unless you are aiming for preferment.

I was learning that the very discipline I thought necessary in Opposition was every bit as critical, if not more so, in government; and that meant a constant interaction with the political troops. In turn, this was so much more difficult because suddenly the schedule was dominated by major meetings and functions.

Another lesson was therefore being learned. Foreign leaders had to be seen, those you needed or wanted to see and those you didn’t. There was ceremony and protocol, much of which was unavoidable. There were summits, NATO, Europe, the G8. The summits were tiring and only occasionally productive. There was also the handing back of Hong Kong to China.

I travel fairly easily, but the Hong Kong trip, done in a day and a half, was exhausting. It was also my first real experience of China’s leadership. It was an odd occasion. I was very attached to Hong Kong. I had visited reasonably often since my sister-in-law Katy was Hong Kong Chinese. She was very instructive on the subject of the return of the colony. Obviously she was Anglophile. Brought up a Catholic. Had lived a long time in the UK. But when I asked her if she felt sad at the return, she said immediately: ‘No, I’m Chinese, it’s natural to be part of China.’ Occasionally the British fail to see the fact that although we are often regarded in many parts of the world by the indigenous people as having been good colonialists, those people no longer want us as colonialists. In the end, however benign we were, they prefer to run themselves and make their own mistakes.

But at the handover ceremony I still felt a tug, not of regret but of nostalgia for the old British Empire. Later that night, I crossed the harbour to the Kowloon side in a tugboat, in the torrential rain, to meet China’s leaders. The lights fused at the landing place and the hotel quayside was lit by Chinese lanterns that swayed and jangled in the wind and the choppy water. I went upstairs feeling I must have looked about thirty (I aged quickly in the job as you can see), to greet Jiang Zemin and the assembled Chinese top brass. He completely threw me by talking with greater knowledge about Shakespeare than I could have possibly mustered and joking away as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He then explained to me that this was a new start in UK/China relations and from now on, the past could be put behind us. I had, at that time, only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what that past was. I thought it was all just politeness in any case. But actually, he meant it. They meant it. And relations with China did indeed make substantial progress from that day.

Equally, as part of the rhythm of government, came the inevitable personal scandals. I say inevitable, because there is no doubt that in any government, they will come. We made a very big mistake in allowing the impression to be gained that we were going to be better than the Tories; not just better at governing, but more moral, more upright. As a matter of record, I never said we were going to be purer than pure; I said we were going to be
expected
to be purer than pure, and I did so to stress the dangers. I came to regret the whole characterisation around the issue of so-called ‘sleaze’. It was a media game, and in Opposition we played it. The goals were easy but the long-term consequences were disastrous. I was aware we were playing with Faust’s companion, but with him onside, it was just too easy to score. And to be fair, I couldn’t see us doing some of the things the Tories had done.